Fitness Tracker Helps Measure Cali Earthquake Strength.

Most people wear fitness trackers to do just that, track their fitness. However people also wear them to track other things, such as their sleep patterns, and it was these people who were of great interest to scientists monitoring earthquake activity in California. Earlier this week there was an earthquake in California that registered as a 6 on the Richter scale. While this normally wouldn’t be all that big of a deal, one maker of the trackers decided to use the information they gathered from people who were wearing them while sleeping to measure the earthquakes intensity by logging who was woken up and where they were from the epicenter.

I don’t think anyone would’ve ever thought of using fitness trackers in that manner and yet the experiment proved to be a success. The sliver of time that Jawbone (the tracker company) showed with startling accuracy both where the epicenter of the quake was and how powerful it was. They did this by tracking the sleeping patterns of those who were woken up and how long they stayed up. Using those numbers, they were able to calculate location and figure out where the epicenter of the quake was. This is just another interesting use for technology like fitness trackers and others who track activity and sleep. They offer an alternative to the usual way of recording earthquake strength and they might continue to be useful in other ventures in the future.